nd igloos and
tents. Hitherto we had often been fortunate could we buy a little flour
and bacon; here the choice comestibles of the earth were for sale. I
looked askance at my greasy parkee as I passed shops where English
broadcloth and Scotch tweeds were displayed; at my worn, clumsy mukluks
when I saw patent-leather pumps. But Nome knows how to welcome the
wanderer from the wilderness and to make him altogether at home. There
could be no warmer hospitality than that with which I was received by
the Reverend John White and his wife, than that which I had at many a
home during my week's stay.

Nothing in the world could have caused the building of a city where Nome
is built except the thing that caused it: the finding of gold on the
beach itself and in the creeks immediately behind it. It has no harbour
or roadstead, no shelter or protection of any kind; it is in as bleak
and exposed a position as a man would find if he should set out to hunt
the earth over for ineligible sites.

But Nome is also a fine instance of the way men in the North conquer
local conditions and wring comfort out of bleakness and desolation by
the clever adaptation of means to ends.

The art of living comfortably in the North had to be learned, and it has
been learned pretty thoroughly. People live at Nome as well as they do
"outside." One may sit down to dinners as well cooked, as well
furnished, as well served as any dinners anywhere. The good folk of Nome
delight in spreading their dainty store before the unjaded appetite of
the winter traveller, and it would be affectation to deny that there is
keen relish of enjoyment in the long-unwonted gleam of wax candle or
electrolier upon perfect appointment of glass, silver, and napery, in
the unobtrusive but vigilant service of white-jacketed Chinaman or Jap.
Nome has a great advantage over its only rival in the interior,
Fairbanks, in the matter of freight rates. The same merchandise that is
landed at the one place for ten or twelve dollars a ton within ten or
twelve days of its leaving Seattle, costs fifty or sixty at the other,
and takes a month or more to arrive. But this accessibility in the
summer is exactly reversed in the winter. No practicable route has been
discovered along the uninhabited shores of Bering Sea, and all the mail
for Nome comes from Valdez to Fairbanks and then down the Yukon and
round Norton Sound by dog team. In winter Fairbanks is within seven or
eight days of open salt